Posts tagged with "Public Health"

It is difficult to overstate the panic, prejudice, and ignorance that accompanied the arrival of AIDS to the United States. In the early 1980s, the cause of the disease was unknown, but speculation about its source included chemicals, infectious organisms, and environmental factors. The one obvious commonality was that the disease initially was ove… Read More

Between 1918 and 1920, the Spanish flu infected a third of the global population. It claimed more lives than either World War I or World War II. Nearly a century later, we are still struggling to understand the extent of this pandemic. It crops up from time to time in popular science and history (1… Read More

In 2015, tuberculosis (TB) claimed about 1.8 million lives. An estimated 10.4 million new cases were diagnosed in that year, 1.2 million of which were in people coinfected with HIV. At least half a million cases showed varying levels of drug resistance, making treatment a greater ordeal for patients and vastly increasing the costs. If… Read More

In December of 2013, a young boy in Guinea succumbed to Ebola, marking the first case in an unprecedented epidemic that would ultimately result in more than 28,000 casualties and claim more than 11,000 lives. Public health workers on the front lines, particularly those associated with the international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Front… Read More

By the mid-1990s, the terror of the early AIDS epidemic had subsided in many western countries, as antiretroviral therapy transformed the once-deadly disease into a chronic condition. In China, however, the AIDS epidemic was just getting started. Slipping across the nation’s southern borders via injection drug use, the virus went largely undetect… Read More

Inequality is core to virtually any Western conception of health justice. There is robust debate over which inequalities, if any, are unethical and over priority-setting among inequalities. Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice, edited by three scholars (two anthropologists and a philosopher) represents one of the latest contributions to t… Read More

City residents living in “food deserts” lack easy access to grocery stores or other healthy food options. This situation disproportionately occurs in low-income communities, lowering overall public health and exacerbating inequality. Ron Finley of South Los Angeles, one of the primary subjects of Can You Dig This, paints an even grimmer picture… Read More